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measurable effects.47
47
In stark contrast to the sonic booms and airport noise
that attracted environmentalists to the anti-SST camp in the 1960s, cli-
matic change as a mainstream environmental issue presented few direct,
tangible threats to either human health or the natural world.
Even so, scientists like Kellogg and SCEP organizer Carroll Wilson
did not shy away from associating climate research with other problems of
the global environment. The
Study of Man's Impact on Climate
(SMIC), for
example, a follow-up to SCEP, also sponsored by MIT, positioned human-
ity's impact on the atmosphere as a mainstream environmental issue, both
in content and in presentation. Like SCEP, SMIC's primary recommenda-
tions involved science policy, including a $17.5 million global monitoring
program. But with an iconic NASA image of the earth from space gracing
the report's cover, and a Sanskrit prayer reading “Oh, Mother earth, ocean-
girdled and mountain-breasted, pardon me for trampling on you” as the
frontispiece, the published study also appealed to the precautionary ethos
of the Earth Day teach-ins led by prominent environmental scientists and
activists in April of the previous year.
48
By 1971, scientific concerns about
the atmosphere had become part of popular concern over the global envi-
ronment. Atmospheric scientists themselves, however, hardly made typical
environmentalists.
scientists as environmentalists?
On the Wikipedia page for Charles David Keeling, the term
environmentalist
appears exactly zero times. Neither does
conservationist, activist,
or any deri-
vation of the word
political.
49
Keeling was an outdoorsman amd a longtime
member of the Wilderness Society, and in 2005, shortly before his death,
he received the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement. Keeling's 1963
article on CO
2
as a form of pollution reflected a precautionary ethos that
he shared with many self-described conservationists and environmental-
ists of his era; and his concerns over CO
2
, like those of his scientific col-
leagues, grew out of the cultural milieu that hatched Rachel Carson and
David Brower. But like most of his scientific colleagues, Keeling probably
would not have described his work on CO
2
and climate change as “envi-
ronmentalism.” Despite the commonalities between scientists like Keeling
who were interested in problems of atmospheric change and environmen-
talists who worried about ecological destruction, the SST debate reveals
